Wednesday, June 12, 2013

I am a news picture nut. I spent 40 years pursuing the trade
on seven national newspapers, picture editing three of them during their great
eras, but brilliant photography in any genre always thrills me. Modern easy
public snapshotting is now the norm but it's destroying the newsmans' art,
driving those talented men and women into specialist areas, barely able to make
a living. But I still love the work of the other camerafolk whose passions take
them elsewhere. Today it's the
depths of the seas.

Every year the annual awards showcase these underwater men and
womens' extraordinary talents. It's the Best Underwater Photographer of the Year competition awards. And what a magnificent collection they are. Here I
give you just a taste of them. Click on the pictures to enlarge them. Enjoy:

A diver swims next to a huge shoal of fish in Cabo Pulmo,
Mexico - this won the gold award in the Wide Angle Traditional category

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A close up of a mako shark opening its mouth wide off the

coast of the Neptune Islands, Australia - this won the gold award

in the Wide
Angle Unrestricted category

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A fashion model swims with a whale shark in the Philippines,
Pacific - this won the silver award

in the Commercial, Conceptual and Fashion
category

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A trio of pelicans dunk their heads in the water off the Central

Coast, in New South Wales - this won the honourable mention

in the Wide
Angle Unrestricted category

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Two seahorses embrace in Singer Island, Florida, which won
Bronze in the Animal Behaviour category

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A close up of a shark off the Faial Islands, Azores - this
won

the silver award in the Animal Behaviour category

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A seahorse next to a shipwreck in Eilat, Israel - this won

the silver award in the Compact Cameras category

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A close up of a Goby in the Red Sea, Middle East - this won the bronze award in the Compact Cameras category

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Word
comes this week that the French are no longer drinking wine. Mon Dieu! What
is the world coming to?Apparently
this decline has been going on for years. Those delicious bottles of Cabernet
Sauvignon or Bordeaux are disappearing from their dinner tables. In 1980 over
50% of French adults consumed the crushed grape daily - now it's just 17%. By
my reckoning that's eight out of ten of our Gallic brethren don't imbibe.

Now,
I love the stuff. Rarely seen without it, but there's more.

Denis
Saverot, editor of La Revue des Vins de France magazine, says it's the working
class who made it popular in the first place. He blames the war.

"Basically
the soldiers went over the top pickled on pinard, the strong, low-quality wine
which was supplied in bulk. Up until then the Normans, the Bretons, the people
of Picardy and the north, they had never touched wine. But they learned in the
trenches. By the 1950s there were drinking outlets, cafes and bars, everywhere.
Tiny villages would have five or six."

Sounds
fine to me. So, where did it all go wrong?Denis continues.

"It is
our bourgeois, technocratic elite with their campaigns against drink-driving
and alcoholism, lumping wine in with every other type of alcohol, even though
it should be regarded as totally different," he says.

"Recently
I heard one senior health official saying that wine causes cancer 'from the
very first glass'. That coming from a Frenchman. Our elites prefer to keep the
country on chemical anti-depressants and wean us off wine. In the 1960s, we
were drinking 160 litres each a year and weren't taking any pills. Today we
consume 80 million packets of anti-depressants, and wine sales are collapsing."

He ends.
"The village bar has gone, replaced by a pharmacy."

Denis
has got a point worth us Anglais taking on board. Traditionally we use beer and
pubs in the same way - to socialise. We always have. Got a problem? Have a beer
and a chuckle with friends. That's the difference between a round of drinks and
anti-depressants. Communal pill popping never solved anything. We later added
wine, French originally and now universally available, to our hospitality. Are
we also to go the way of those across the Mer?

Oxford-based
French writer Theodore Zeldin has the last word, and this might sound familiar.

"A
business-style culture has made huge inroads into France - the bane of all
those who prefer to take the time to savour things. Companionship has been
replaced by networking. Business means busy-ness. The old French art de vivre
is still there. It's an ideal. Of course times have changed, but it still
survives. We have a duty to entertain, to converse. And in France - thanks to
our education system - we still have that ability to converse in a general,
universalist way that has been lost elsewhere. "

"That
is the art de vivre. It is about taking your time. And wine is part of it,
because with wine you have to take your time. After
all, that is one of the great things about wine. You can't swig it."

Order me a
glass of Bordeaux immediately - and send my psychiatrist packing.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

The Natural History Museum has released this fascinating
picture of the genus Remora or
Sharksucker fish which uses the unique sucking disc on its head to attach
itself to large marine animals such as sharks or turtles. There has long been
legends of a fish that sticks to sailing ships and has powers to slow them
down. Now scientists have shown that this fish developed a
modified dorsal fin just for this use.

One wonders if mammals also developed along these specialist
lines. One, perhaps evolved into the Bankersucker which attaches itself to
customers accounts thus drawing off sustenance to convert into yachts and
bonuses.

Or the Benefitsucker that seeks out taxpayers, particularly
targeting daft councillors with empty five bedroom houses?

Or the MPsucker, a particularly brazen species that spots
empty flats near the Houses of Parliament and attaches them to Commons expenses
forms.

David Attenborough should be alerted. There's a series here
for next Christmas.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

The Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year award winners are on view now at the Natural History Museum. Always a stunning show there are 100 wonderful prize winners to see there in December. I've posted some already, but this one by French wildlife cameraman, Gregoire Bouguereau, captured my attention. Read Gregoire's explanation to experience Nature's fierce laws of survival.

Practice run

When a female cheetah caught but
didn’t kill a Thomson’s gazelle calf and waited for her cubs to join her,
Grégoire guessed what was about to happen. He’d spent nearly a decade studying
and photographing cheetahs in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, and he
knew that the female’s behaviour meant one thing: a hunting lesson was due to
begin. The female moved away, leaving the calf lying on the ground near her
cubs. At first, the cubs took no notice of it. But when it struggled jerkily to
its feet ‘the cubs’ natural predatory instincts were triggered,’ says Grégoire.
‘Each cub’s gaze locked on to the calf as it made a break for freedom.’ The
lesson repeated itself several times, with the cubs ignoring the calf when it
was on the ground and catching it whenever it tried to escape – ‘an exercise
that affords the cubs the chance to practise chases in preparation for the time
they’ll have to do so for real.’

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Browsing through the annual International Photography Awards
is always a pleasure. Now in its 10th year this must be the most comprehensive
competition in the industry with over 61 Pro categories and a similar amount
for Non-Pros & Students. To
date the IPA have paid out over $175,000 in prizes.

This year I was struck by the entry of Netherlands wildlife
photographer Marsel van Oosten whose wildlife work is familiar to National
Geographic readers. Marsel and his partner Daniella Sibbing run wildlife workshops
all over the world for their students.

His entry is titled "Close Encounters."

It's not
hard to see why. Without Marsel's courage I'd be inclined to call it "Run
Like Hell!"

Monday, October 1, 2012

It's the photographic awards season again. My favourite time of year. Leading off is the brilliant Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition owned by the Natural History Museum and BBC Worldwide.

From an entry of thousands they whittle it down to 52 superb commended images who then vie for the title. The winners are announced on October 17th and the exhibition opens to the public two days later at the Museum. Well worth a visit. Here is just a taste of it:

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

The Medusa Emerald is one of the world’s finest mineral specimens, having been hidden for millions of years in a huge bolder of quartz. The Natural History Museum in London now has it on display, the first time in Europe, and it's a unique Emerald. It is
unusually large with high clarity and intense, strong colouring and is more
like eight Emerald sticks protruding from a bed ofquartz rock.

Its owners, Gemfields, used state-of-the-art techniques to
reveal it, millimetre by millimetre, cutting it from the rock to reveal the beautiful
emerald crystals within, a labour that took several months by the world's specialists.

Writing The Emerald Killers began my fascination with
emeralds. I used the notorious
Boyaca Emerald Valley in Colombia as a backdrop for my thriller about the illegal trade in emeralds there. I also discovered
that the green gemstones should not exist at all. A quirk of nature millennia
ago brought chromium and vanadium from another continent across the world,
trapped in the earth’s moving tectonic plates, to fuse with clear beryllium,
creating the lustre of the intense green colouring.

Emerald is twenty times more rare than diamond and sells at
the same price per carat. Its specific gravity being low any emerald is larger
per carat than other gems. If you hold an emerald to the sun you will see its
fine ‘garden of inclusions,’ a tracery of tiny chambers trapping the gases of
its creation within it. These do not detract from the price.

These ‘inclusions’ are sealed with palm or cedar wood oil
before it’s sold. In my book they are smuggled out of Colombia to New York and
legitimised into the gem trade.

Thriller writer

welcome to my blog.

I wrote thrillers from a fishing village on the Mediterranean for 14 years and publish them as kindle downloads on Amazon as well as in epub format for other ebook readers.

Before that I was a UK tabloid Picture Editor.

Now I have returned to the UK which is my home.

How to read a kindle book on anything!

If you don't have a Kindle Reader go to the Amazon.com site. Find the kindle book you want. Go to the panel on the right. Download Kindle for PC/Mac/Blackberry/iphone/ipad/Android/ and you're ready to go!